


Captain America is Not Hydra For Fuck's Sake

by die_traumerei



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hydra (Marvel), M/M, Nazis, cap is not hydra, fuck all of the things, god dammit, i cannot fucking believe I have to fix THIS in canon, i cannot fucking believe i have to write this story, in case you just can't take anymore, yeah so this is about hydra cap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 11:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6982633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/die_traumerei/pseuds/die_traumerei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I CANNOT BELIEVE I HAD TO GODDAMN WRITE THIS. I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT MARVEL PLANTED THE SEED THAT BECAME THIS STORY.</p>
<p>Although not quite up to the classic of the genre <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6968407/chapters/15885397">Nazi Cap</a>, I honestly hope this is just one of many.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captain America is Not Hydra For Fuck's Sake

**Author's Note:**

> This is my attempt to witness love, not hate.

Since he had unfrozen (the second time), moved back to Brooklyn, become an Avenger, married Steve Rogers in a small private ceremony, gone on a long, even more private honeymoon where he was still pretty sure they'd discovered whole new ways to have sex, fallen more in love every day, come home, stayed an Avenger, and started taking cooking classes at the community center, Bucky Barnes had learned many, many things about his lifelong best friend. It helped to think of them like sets of infinite numbers; he'd never know, for example, _all_ of the ways to make Steve lose the ability to talk just by applying his mouth to various parts of Steve's body, but he could  define a very large (infinitely large) set of those ways. And he had another infinite set, which was ways he could make Steve's eyes go soft and make him smile with his whole face, not just that sad smile Bucky still caught (and chased away) sometimes. And he had an infinite set consisting of ways Steve responded to people who were morons about him, or rather, who were morons about the way they thought _Steve_ would think.

It started, as so many things did, with Fox News. Clint had been hate-watching it and Bucky joined in, in disgusted fascination. Steve had been wandering by, verbally judging the two of them aloud, when one of the commentators made a point to the effect of “Steve Rogers didn't die to save the United States only for it to be overrun with immigrants.”

Clint, not moving his eyes from the screen, opened up the video record function on his phone and pointed it at Steve.

“What the fuck,” was how it started and “ _furthermore_ , my _mother_ was an immigrant you uneducated pile of turds, so go say that to her _grave_ , and the graves of everyone who came here looking for a better life!” was how it ended, and it broke YouTube and Bucky had never in his life been prouder of his husband.

H e learned how to tell the difference between the ways people underestimated Steve. If he could hear Steve yelling from another room, someone had decided what he did (or didn't) die for. If Steve grabbed him and shoved him up against a wall for a searing kiss, a pundit was being anti-gay. (That had been especially fun after they'd come out. He had had bruises on his hips for  _days_ . Steve had kissed them when his temper cooled, his mouth warm and soft on Bucky's skin, and it was the best of all possible worlds, it really was.)  If there was the sound of things being thrown, someone had attributed some deeply conservative belief to Steve. 

Bucky had fun filming it  at first , but the charm wore off quickly. These people were  _hateful_ , and they were hurtful, and they made the world a worse place. Any kind of hilarity faded in Steve's anger, the righteous fury that hid the man who was hurt by these words. No amount of formal refutation, angry tweets, or YouTube videos calmly explaining that Steve had absolutely no problem with trans people - who incidentally had not been invented in 1968 - and in fact he would be funding a network of shelters for QUILTBAG youth across America. One for every pundit who assured the world that Steven Grant Rogers definitely hated the gays. 

(Bucky had got to sit in on that video, and actually was the one who explained how they  had  worked out the number of shelters to  set up . They had finished the video with a kiss, Steve's hand coming up to touch Bucky's cheek, his wedding ring plainly visible. Nothing would ever feel that good again, not even the second honeymoon they were already planning.)

They tried to turn the hate into good, as best they could. Bucky filmed Steve's angry rebuttals, and sparred with him when there was no way else to process his rage, and held him when he wept because there wasn't anything else he could do. They did the best they could, and it helped, a little. Gradually, people stopped putting words in Steve's mouth; gradually they stopped telling the world lies about him, because the truth was right there for anyone to see.

And then, on a bright summer day, Bucky learned a whole new way for people to be dickbags, which was actually a very old way.

Tony had roused them awake way too early in the morning. They had been fighting stupid tiny flying robots on the High Line for hours the day before; everyone on the team was nursing small stab wounds from their stupid little lances, and everyone was exhausted. Steve and Bucky had patched each other up and stumbled home, falling into bed and fast asleep before ten.

Bucky had woken up first; he hadn't had the sense Steve did to turn his phone off the night before. The two of them were wrapped together as was usual, Steve resting his head on Bucky's shoulder Bucky's left arm protectively around him. He groped for his phone and answered it. “'lo?”

“Bucky, is Steve awake?”

Tony used Bucky's real name approximately never, and that alone sparked him to full wakefulness. This was serious. Was someone hurt? Was there a side effect to the little robots, and now one of the unenhanced team members was sick, or worse? “No, what's wrong?” he asked, Steve waking up when he sensed the tension in Bucky's body. “Never mind, he's up now, you're on speaker.”

“Tony? What's wrong?” Steve asked, wide awake and sitting up beside Bucky.

“Internet. Check online. Honestly, why do the two of you live in the Dark Ages? You should have a monitor in front of you at all times.”

“Tony, what's _wrong_?” Bucky asked, stumbling out of bed to get his laptop. He brought it back and opened it, pulling up his newsfeed.

“Oh,” he said dully, seeing what was wrong. It was headline news for every US paper, at least, and was definitely getting attention from The Guardian, Der Spiegel and Pravda, at least, and probably more to follow.

“Oh my God,” Steve breathed. “No. _No_.”

It was so simple, it could be explained in a few paragraphs. Someone had manufactured 'evidence' that Steve was secretly a Hydra double-agent, and had been indoctrinated with the Red Skull's beliefs since he was a child. That Sarah had taken him to Hydra meetings, and that Steve was a deep-cover agent, and always had been.

Bucky started cursing in every language he knew about halfway through, but Steve was silent as they read together. Tony, for the first time in his life, tactfully hung up and let them look through the stories themselves. Each  article was more detailed than the last, and the most horrific part – each one was taking the story seriously, examining the proofs this person had made, and most articles struck an ambivalent tone.  In the eyes of the world, Steve Rogers  _probably_ wasn't a Nazi, but you could never be sure, and the evidence should be weighed properly.

When they got to the one that had a picture of Steve in the WWII uniform next to an image from Buchanwald, Steve shoved the laptop away and went into the bathroom to be audibly sick to his stomach.

Bucky, fallen silent by the cruelty of it all, kept reading. It occurred to him that he and Steve were  part of a shrinking population who had firsthand knowledge of Nazis. Who had seen the  whole villages who were slaughtered , and who had watched the particular fascism of Hitler grow.  Most people alive only knew history as a dry thing, written down. As an internet joke, as something you had to learn in school, as Godwin's Law.

He closed the laptop when Steve came back and held out his arms, gathering his husband close. 

“It's a lie. It's all a lie,” Steve said, and Bucky gave him a good shake.

“I know you're not fuckin' tellin' me that, thinkin' I need to be reminded,” he said sharply, falling back into his Brooklyn patois.

“Don't know who knows what anymore,” Steve said bitterly. “'m sorry. I know you know. I just... my _Mom_ , Buck, my fuckin' Mom. They called my Mom a Nazi.”

“Your mother couldn't hate anyone if she had tried,” Bucky said, trying to comfort. “We'll fight this Steve. Something big, not some fuckin' YouTube thing. A real press conference. A lawsuit. We'll make everyone know this asshole's just doin' it for the attention.”

“Which'll work great until next time,” Steve said bitterly. “Until the next time 'never forget' stops having a meaning. It's just black and white pictures. How we gonna convince the world that...that Hydra was _evil_. That the Nazis were _evil_ , and they were _real_ , and so, so many people died. We can't do that.”

“But we can chip away at it,” Bucky argued. “We can show how this fucking 'evidence' is wrong. How your mother was the kindest woman to ever live, and how you been fightin' for what's right since the day you were born. How we'd go to Seder every year, a different neighbor every time. How...how we saw what the Nazis did. We can stand witness, and we can talk, and remind people that this is real, that this isn't a joke or something to be said lightly.”

“We gotta,” Steve agreed softly. “Wish I knew it was doin' some good.”

“It is!” Bucky gave him a little shake. “How many gay kids write to you, tellin' you that they were gonna kill themselves, but because Steve Rogers is a queer too, they won't. Because you give 'em a place to stay, and a hero.”

“They write those letters to you, too,” Steve said, because he was the most supportive little shit in the history of the world.

“So we're gonna stand up,” Bucky continued, “and have a giant fuckin' televised conference, and you're gonna stand up and tell every Jewish kid in this country that they got a right to live free, and that you got their back, and I do too, and all the Avengers do. And we're gonna get people from the Holocaust Museum to put together people to tell their stories, and their families stories, 'cause it's _their_ history to tell, and we're gonna give 'em a voice,” Bucky said.

“And it'll go out in every medium we can get it on,” Steve said slowly. “Closed-captioned and signed and verbal description. TV and radio and stream it. A reminder, the stories and the reminder of what happened, and how it can _never_ happen again. What hate does to people, and how real it is.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “We'll do all that.”

“This fucker will regret he ever took me on over this,” Steve said, voice deep and steady and cold as ice.

And he did.

**Author's Note:**

> come and be really angry with me in the comments or at dietraumerei.tumblr.com


End file.
